Viewed from above, the fields surrounding Büchel air base stretch out like a greenish-brown patchwork quilt, punctuated by the small villages and woodlands that make up the Eifel region in western Germany.

Take a closer look at satellite imagery, and you can make out several dozen camouflaged airplane hangars. Hidden deep below them lies a carefully guarded secret: underground vaults housing American nuclear bombs that date back to the Cold War. [ ]

In March 2010, Germanys parliament, the Bundestag, passed a cross-party resolution urging the government to emphatically work towards getting its American allies to withdraw all nuclear weapons from Germany. It followed then-US President Barack Obamas call to create a world without nuclear weapons.

But, a decade on, that goal seems ever more elusive, following Russias annexation of Crimea in 2014 and investment in nuclear-capable medium-range missiles. Now, rather than working towards the bombs withdrawal, the US military is set to modernize and upgrade them. [ ]

The new bomb  the B-61-12  will have significantly enhanced capabilities, says (FAS director Hans) Kristensen: It is equipped with a tail kit, which enables it to be delivered and hit its target much more accurately. Kristensen has modeled its accuracy at about 30 to 60 meters (98 to 196 feet). The current bombs are simply dropped from the plane, rather than like ones with tail kits, which guide themselves once released. Many experts worry that may make the bomb more attractive to deploy  as, rather than wiping out an entire region, it could be used to strike a precise target.

[But the Russian nukes in Kaliningrad are widely accepted and not controversial, right?]

Russia is possibly one of the few powers in WWII that emerged at the end of the war with significantly more territory than it had at the beginning. For a country that kicked the war off by allying with Germany to annex Poland, thereby giving Germany a free hand in the West, its image is remarkably good. I credit Russian propaganda efforts combined with those of fellow travelers in the West.

4
posted on 03/25/2020 7:22:44 PM PDT
by Zhang Fei
(My dad had a Delta 88. That was a car. It was like driving your living room.)

The specter of bioweapons use, and the potential stealth that could conceal their use, raises the question of ‘What constitutes mutually assured destruction in the context of bioweapons?”. Mutually assured destruction is a major factor that has kept nukes from being used, but how does this concept apply to bioweapons?

At present, the potential to respond to bioweapons with nukes is a possible deterrent, and the upgrading of our nuclear capacity is thus very important. I hate that the world runs this way, but it often does, and we need to protect our families and ourselves.

Sigh...Every ten-twenty years or so we must re-educate a new generation of snowflakes as to why nuclear weapons are still necessary to counter those possessed by potential adversaries. Don’t they learn this stuff in school? Dumb question, I know. They teach them unilateral disarmament assuming that good will will make them reciprocate.

I remember when the older B57s were replaced by the first B61s, which was a big upgrade at the time. As an Emergency Actions Team member I spent many hours practicing manual unlocking, disabling, dis-enabling, and other permissive action link procedures on the new B61s. They were pretty sophisticated and had features that are probably still classified so I wont elaborate. My guess is that these also have some more highly classfied features that we will never be privy to.

Develop the illusion that total disarmament by the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.

 Communist goal #3

What is wrong with our state of mind? First and foremost, we have been thinking the way the communists want us to think. Our Founding Fathers would be alarmed to learn how confused many of our people have become over such fundamental problems as coexistence, disarmament, free trade, the United Nations, recognition of Red China, and a host of related problems. Instead of maintaining a state of intellectual vigilance, we have taken communist slogans as the major premises for too many of our conclusions.

 The Naked Communist, chapter 12

A few decades of teaching phony commie values in the public schools (those schools themselves being a goal mentioned in the tenth plank of communism in the Manifesto) will produce rotten fruits.

I served as a loader on my last deployment (they used to make up parts of the loading teams from non-ordinance specialties...I don’t recall why) and we would do the loading drills...I recall it was highly ritualized, reading checklists from manuals as we did it, and they had members from the Marine detachment standing guard as you did it in full combat gear (back when they still had Marine detachments on carriers)

Saw a guy get clocked with the stock of an M-16 one time by a Marine as he ran through the cordon...I think he was a damage control guy on the way to a fire alarm or something and he cut through the perimeter in a rush, not thinking, and the Marine knocked him on his ass. They were all business there.

Dang. That was a long time ago.

15
posted on 03/25/2020 8:19:02 PM PDT
by rlmorel
(The Coronavirus itself will not burn down humanity. But we may burn ourselves down to be rid of it.)

It is a Leftist thing. I have long viewed it as one of the cleavage points between Leftists and Conservatives.

We conservatives recognize that there is evil in the world as an integral part of human nature, and being nice to them won’t get you more than being taken advantage of at best, and at worst, killed. Summarized as “Some people just need killing.”

Leftists have this perverted notion that people are inherently good, and they are corrupted and made evil by something in their environment (such as Poverty, Ignorance, and Disease, and, in the last few decades, things like “social injustice”, “economic injustice”, and sexism, racism, you name it) MADE them evil, and that if you can take away those things, somehow those people can be cured and some Utopia can be achieved.

We know better. There are simply evil people out there, and some of them quite enjoy being evil.

So it is no surprise that Leftists believe that if we put down our guns, they will put down theirs. After all, they love their children too.

17
posted on 03/25/2020 8:28:44 PM PDT
by rlmorel
(The Coronavirus itself will not burn down humanity. But we may burn ourselves down to be rid of it.)

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